switch 2 Open Source OS

[saeed]

Hello,
I still remember when i use MSDOS for the first time ... using command prompt doing all the things without mouse clicks...

Now am sick of using Microsoft products, seriously ... and badly want to switch over to Open Source operating system... I know little about linux ... but dont know whats happening at the back-end ... so instead of using Fedora or any other GUI interface OS... a friend of mine recommended me to use Unix ...

I want to start from basics ... using command line interface and then want to move to a gui interface... but not sure about which one should i use... can anyone out there show me the right direction ... please share your experience.

many thanks,

Saeed.

[abduraooft]

All Linux distributions are coming with their command prompt (terminal) by default. You can take this option even from the GUI too. Or if you don't want to see the GUI, you may switch to the terminal mode by just pressing a combination of Ctrl+Alt+(F1-F7), where F1-F7 will bring you 6 different terminals(by default with Fedora), and terminal#7 is the default graphical display.

[ralph l mayo]

I suggest you download and install the Ubuntu server ISO. It's still Ubuntu qua Ubuntu, so you get great community support, but it installs a minimal setup, leaving you with a command prompt after installation, at which point you can customize your system easily with a network connection and the 'aptitude' package manager.

Apart from being a good way to to set up an efficient and secure Linux installation, the minimal install will also give you a relatively gentle introduction to command line, as you'll have to learn at the bare minimum how to navigate around the *nix file tree, how to use the package manager, and how to edit files with vim/nano/emacs/whatever.

If you'd prefer an excruciatingly thorough introduction to the command line, consider Linux From Scratch, which gives you a few tools and a thick book of instructions to build your own distribution. Basically you boot into a command line start on page 1 of the book, manually typing in commands equivalent to what the installer would do for you in another distribution. In theory it's a great way to learn about system administration but in practice I don't know how much any of what you do will stick with you.

On the other side of the spectrum, although this doesn't really sound like what you asked for too much, if you have problems just jumping into the command line you could get an Apple. OS X is Unix-based, and it'll allow you to do as much or as little with the command line as you want, it seems to me. I've got a mac pro at work I only use via SSH, so it's definitely not tied too strongly to the gui to be useful as a basic Unix.

[oracleguy]

If you want something that will provide a little bit of a challenge but provide great insight into how the OS is setup, I'd suggest using Gentoo Linux. It isn't the shake and bake of Linux distros but you have very specific control of how everything is setup and what is installed. And there is a lot of working in at the command line if you like that. There are GUI tools to do a lot of the day to day system admin stuff though if you want to use them.

[saeed]

thank you very much guys for ur replies ... there should be a public opinion survey ... wht OS u used and why and questions related to it... security.. extension supported, commonly used softwares like Office, Photo editing, Internet Server, FTP Software and above all... cross platform file support ... right now i've very limited information about linux as i've been using windows most of the time... I use MS Word quite often... I've not used open office but am sure there must be a utility in which u can access *.doc file in Open Office (*nix environment)... Similarly .mp3 supported in *nix or not ...

Saeed.

[Aradon]

I use (when I have a linux system up) Fedora. Now I know that some people absolutely hate Fedora, but ever since Core 4 came out I can't seem to get away from it.

It's "Yum"my

;)

In other thoughts, Fedora is capable of installing the usual Open Source software you can find in order to do Office things, Photo Editing, "Internet Server", FTP Servers, etc.

Now is Fedora as easy as Ubuntu? Probably not. But Fedora was never meant to be. It always, to me, seemed to be more of a developer friendly environment, rather then a user friendly one.

But those are just my two cents.

[ghell]

There aren't that many real unix systems any more. I'm pretty sure BSD and OSX (at least until 10.5) aren't.

Although I have slated it in the past (which turned out to be a problem with Ubuntu's stability not Debians at all) At the moment I am very happy with a minimal Debian (http://www.debian.org/) install from the netinst (~180MiB) or buisnesscard (~40MiB but you need an internet connection every time you install) images (I use lenny but if you prefer slightly more stability over a lot newer features, such as in a server enviroment, etch is what you want). I just select a mirror then deselect everything in the "tasks" page of the installation and it gives me a very speedy command line only install.

After installing remember to remove the CDROM line from /etc/apt/sources.list. so that installing packages come straight from the internet and it doesn't complain that you don't have the CD in any more. I don't know why they leave it there, especially for buisnesscard and netinst images.

If you just want a command line all you might really want after the install (which only takes a few minutee if you deselected "desktop environment" and "standard system") is "less", maybe a web browser such as "elinks", maybe "sudo" if you prefer it to su.

If you want a fast (well, about as fast as gnome gets) gui just run
apt-get install xserver-xorg gnome-core gdm(note that when I did this 2 weeks ago on lenny I also had to install nautilus, metacity, gnome-panel etc but when I did it on another machine last week it was all included in gnome-core and seems to be more stable and strangely faster than my manual install of the child packages. If you use Etch I expect you will need to install nautilus metacity gnome-panels gnome-terminal etc separately). If you want it to start command line each time and then you turn on the gui only if you want it, don't install gdm, just the other 2 packages then when you want a gui type "startx"

Anyway, I hope that gives you some idea of what Debian is like or at least enough to go on if you want to try it out for some basic things.

Here are some common download links (I find some can be a bit hard to find on the debian site sometimes):
Etch (stable) 32 bit (i386) netinst (http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r1/i386/iso-cd/debian-40r1-i386-netinst.iso)
Etch (stable) 64 bit (AMD64) netinst (http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/4.0_r1/amd64/iso-cd/debian-40r1-amd64-netinst.iso)
Lenny (testing) 32 bit (i386) netinst (http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso) (daily build)
Lenny (testing) 64 bit (AMD64) netinst (http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/amd64/iso-cd/debian-testing-amd64-netinst.iso) (daily build)

Note that if you don't have an i386 or AMD64 processor, Debian also supports alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, mips, mipsel, powerpc and sparc

[oracleguy]

thank you very much guys for ur replies ... there should be a public opinion survey ... wht OS u used and why and questions related to it... security.. extension supported, commonly used softwares like Office, Photo editing, Internet Server, FTP Software and above all... cross platform file support ... right now i've very limited information about linux as i've been using windows most of the time... I use MS Word quite often... I've not used open office but am sure there must be a utility in which u can access *.doc file in Open Office (*nix environment)... Similarly .mp3 supported in *nix or not ...

Saeed.

OpenOffice can open (and save) Microsoft Office documents (at least through version 2003) natively.

MP3s are supported yes, as well as other audio codecs. There is a really nice music player that runs on Linux called Amarok.

[saeed]

Thank you very much guys .. for your info...

anyone of use have ever used Sun Solaris ??


thanks,


Saeed.

[Aradon]

Thank you very much guys .. for your info...

anyone of use have ever used Sun Solaris ??


thanks,


Saeed.

Too much. But I've never seen Sun Solaris used as a home unix system. Mostly you see it in business where you want COMPLETE control of the network system. In my experience, where things like Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu have security, Sun Solaris has "Uber" Security.

It should be noted though, that we were using sun blades at the place I worked, so it was no wonder why we were using Solaris..

Wiki Link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system))

I want to add that if you plan on doing a lot of multi-processing stuff then Solaris would be a good choice. In ending, I've never used the Java Desktop that is now in use for Solaris 10. Although the idea looks interesting..

[nikos101]

I suggest you download and install the Ubuntu server ISO. It's still Ubuntu qua Ubuntu, so you get great community support, but it installs a minimal setup, leaving you with a command prompt after installation, at which point you can customize your system easily with a network connection and the 'aptitude' package manager.

Apart from being a good way to to set up an efficient and secure Linux installation, the minimal install will also give you a relatively gentle introduction to command line, as you'll have to learn at the bare minimum how to navigate around the *nix file tree, how to use the package manager, and how to edit files with vim/nano/emacs/whatever.

If you'd prefer an excruciatingly thorough introduction to the command line, consider Linux From Scratch, which gives you a few tools and a thick book of instructions to build your own distribution. Basically you boot into a command line start on page 1 of the book, manually typing in commands equivalent to what the installer would do for you in another distribution. In theory it's a great way to learn about system administration but in practice I don't know how much any of what you do will stick with you.

On the other side of the spectrum, although this doesn't really sound like what you asked for too much, if you have problems just jumping into the command line you could get an Apple. OS X is Unix-based, and it'll allow you to do as much or as little with the command line as you want, it seems to me. I've got a mac pro at work I only use via SSH, so it's definitely not tied too strongly to the gui to be useful as a basic Unix.

I have installed this on Virtual Box on a whinedouze Vista machine. Can I still run this as a server to the outside world?

[oracleguy]

Yes you can.

[nikos101]

Cool, but will it be as stable as it would be on top of no windows installation?

[oracleguy]

Assuming there aren't any stability issues with the host OS. I run several virtual servers (Linux and Windows) under a Windows 2003 host OS; never had any issues.

[ghell]

I run a lot of Debian Etch servers on top of Windows Server 2003 without issues too (next server I buy will use ESX 3.5). The only issue would be if the host machine crashes, it would take the guest with it. If the guest was physically installed on a separate machine, of course, it would not.

My Windows Server 2003 box has never crashed (and neither have the Debian VMs running on it) in 3 years.

[nikos101]

If you don't mind me asking, what do you use these virtual servers for? :)

[nikos101]

After installing Ubuntu server on Virtual Box on a whinedouze Vista machine I get the following messsage on startup :(



This kernel requires the following features not present on the cpu :6

Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your cpu

[oracleguy]

If you don't mind me asking, what do you use these virtual servers for? :)
One is a subversion server, another is a web server. Things like that, the advantage to virtual server is that you can separate servers by function. That way if one breaks due to a software error, it only takes down that one server and you don't lose the rest.

[nikos101]

How much could your virtual web server handle in terms of users/bandwidth? :)

Also if its so "simple" to set up a web server, why do people pay loads for dedicated ones?

[liorean]

Also if its so "simple" to set up a web server, why do people pay loads for dedicated ones?Because with a dedicated server you:
- Have full control of bandwidth use.
- Have full control over response times.
- Can use the IP without having to use HTTP Host header to distinguish which server you're connecting to, which is needed for most business transaction systems and the like.
- Will never get IP banned because other users of your server on the same IP are spamming.
- Will never get downtime because of other users on the server crashing it.
- Have the full hardware capability at hand instead of having to share it with other users of the same hardware.
- Usually can run any software you want instead of just the set of software the hosting provider install.

[nikos101]

Thanks Lorian but I really meant a dedicated virtual server (There will only be 1 user) on a windows computer vs a commercial dedicated virtual server.

[oracleguy]

Well if you have an 8 processor server with 16GB of ram, etc. You can run one virtual server that does all your virtual hosting and then setup up virtual machines for each of the dedicated servers. That way you can maximize the hardware you have. Of course with this setup, you'd need at least 1 other machine and a NAS so you could have fail over. But the concept is still valid.

[ghell]

A lot of "dedicated" servers are actually virtual servers anyway. For example, you may get a large machine and partition it, then sell them to customers as "dedicated" servers. This way a £3000 machine could be sold to 10 people as a "8 Core Xeon" and they should (in theory) have no idea that others are using the machine. This also makes it easy to reallocate resources. Someone may be able to pay for some additional memory and all you have to do is allocate them more of what is already there, rather than installing a new module.

This is not something that I do with my servers but it is something that you have to look out for if you are looking for a "dedicated" server to avoid getting ripped off. A lot of people actually don't care about this though and they only want a dedicated server to be able to install things on it rather than caring too much whether there is much contention. For example, if someone wanted to install an IRC server (something that would not be possible with standard web hosting but does not need the full resources of a powerful machine.)

Virtual servers are used in business to get the most out of their hardware (why pay to buy and then pay to run 2 physical servers at 45% load when you can use 1 at 90%) while maintaining clear boundaries between the machines. For example, you may want to put something secure on one virutal server and something that poses a slight security risk on another. This would mean that if that vulnerability was exploited, the amount of damage that can be caused is lower.

Other advantages are flexibility and scalability. You can have 8 VMs on 1 machine and if that machine turns out not to be enough, you can move a couple to another machine after buying it. It is mainly cost effectiveness that has greatly increased the popularity of virtual machines in recent years.

I also use VMs a lot for sandbox development (rather than servers at all).

I stick to VMware. I have found it significantly better than any of its competitors. I don't even know if any of the free ones (that compete with the free "VMware Server") can do 64 bit VMs.

[nikos101]

One is a subversion server, another is a web server. Things like that, the advantage to virtual server is that you can separate servers by function. That way if one breaks due to a software error, it only takes down that one server and you don't lose the rest.

What virturalization software do you use?

[oracleguy]

VMWare Server (it's free) for the server stuff and I have one copy of VMWare Workstation for my main computer and on my laptop I use VirtualBox.

[nikos101]

Free wow. I'm gonna go with VMware Server 2.

[nikos101]

VMWare Server (it's free) for the server stuff and I have one copy of VMWare Workstation for my main computer and on my laptop I use VirtualBox.



I couldn't get VirtualBox to run a server. Is it worth the money for VMWare Workstation vs free VirtualBox

[oracleguy]

VirtualBox should run a server just fine. But VMWare Server is better suited for it since it runs them as a system process in the background. And you can attach a console to it over the network.

VirtualBox's support for some hardware like serial and parallel ports is kinda shaky. Which is one of the reasons I have VMWare since I need to use that stuff.